Canvas element as part of HTML5 has been creating a buzz all throughout the web standards community since its introduction, mainly because there are underlying question regarding its capability to change the
future of the web. But for some, it is an opportunity to them to start already on experimenting and developing a application that is based on HTML5.

HTML5 Canvas elements provide an important role for developing drawing objects dynamically such as visualizing information or data in a graph. With HTML5 canvas element it is easily to draw a two dimensional objects or drawing with the help of Javascript. Of course, these would work on any web hosting of your choice

For today’s post we’ve collected amazing library, demos and experiments that uses HTML5 canvas element that produces a charting and graphing solutions. We also added links for further readings and a step by step HTML5 tutorials on creating charts and graphs.

If you have a HTML5 graphs examples or spotted a HTML5 graphs that is not included on our list, feel free to put it on our comment section below.

- Visualize uses a technique with the use of Javascript to get contents or data from a well-structured HTML table, and generate it with the use of native HTML5 canvas drawing ability to transform them into a chart or graph visualization.

- iGrapher is a free web-based financial market visualisation tool for charting, analysis and prediction of different stock, currency and commodity markets. It uses canvas to draw the graphs of financial data.

- ASK KEN™ is sort of a Node-Link diagram that allows to visually navigate through interconnected topics provided by the Freebase Service. It takes advantage of the latest HTML5 features by using the canvas element for drawing.

Flot and Infoviz are both Canvas-based. Flot, like many others, use the excanvas library, to provide backwards compatibility with IE at the expense of speed. Dunno about Infoviz. Both definitely belong in this discussion — probably ahead of many of the other tools in the round-up. Flot is certainly more robust than Visualize, for example.

Some nice examples but you missed out a seriously powerful graphing solution: Highcharts [http://www.highcharts.com]. In browsers it renders the graphs using SVG and in IE as VML so is pretty much cross browser as well as having an attractive UX.
Love to see this tool get more credit.

I’d also point out jqPlot (http://www.jqplot.com) by Chris Leonello, which is a plotting library written in Javascript. For work, I evaluated a TON of Javascript based charting tools, and found jqPlot to be the most robust, best architected, best-maintained (Chris is one of the nicest small project maintainers I’ve run across), best-looking jQuery-based charting library. I wrote a jQuery plugin (http://bitbucket.org/eads/tablechart) to provide the table-scraping behavior of the Visualize plugin (#1 on this list) in conjunction with jqPlot. It supports tables-as-series, columns-as-series, and configurable scraping and parsing for more advanced needs.

HTML5 is great, but what irks me about it is the insistence from management and creative people that this is a replacement for Flash. No it isn’t. Frankly i blame Steve Jobs, his big douchey mouth and his overrated cell phone for severely damaging Flash’s well deserved and long fought for reputation. With HTML5 I’m expected to write 10 times as much code for 1/16 the functionality and it’s doesn’t work on IE. Apple should offer a public apology for the misinformation about HTML5 they have created, and promise the Adobe developers footrubs for life.

I disagree. HTML5 + jQuery + Javascript can replace nearly everything Flash is most known for in the long run. Only graphically intense functions still require Flash, but once WebGL finally gets supported by all major browsers this too should no longer be a problem and WebGL will in fact have superior performance.

Anyway, Flash has always been a piece of crap and while I’m not a fan of Steve Jobs either I support his decision to take the risk of dissing Adobe by not adopting Flash on his (indeed overrated) cell phone. Yes, Javascript based solutions require more code than Flash based solutions, but as more open source frameworks and libraries get developed they will do the grunt work for you so you can focus only on the important code.

Also, while eg. the Canvas tag (imo the msot important HTML5 feature) is not supported by IE, there are libraries that translate the Canvas code to VML, Silverlight or Flash and thus make it available in IE as well. Sure, it’s more slow than on other browsers but at least it works and can serve as a temporary solution until Microsoft gets its act together and implements the Canvas tag in its crappy browser.

I am absolutely amazed at what has been done with canvas and html5! It is really a shame there are so few graphing libraries of this quality for server side languages. All of the most interesting graphing and charting libraries are some combination of javascript and html!

HTML5 supported charts and graphs are really interactive and having lot of advantages. The HTML5 technology has improved codes, improved semantics, consistent, easy accessibility, geo-location support and many more. HTML5 is really only best realized with the use of CSS 3 and JavaScript. JavaScript, in particular, has quickly emerged as one of the best ways to help render great looking effects, animations and contents (could be the charts and charting components as well) etc. With browsers implementing more HTML5 features across platforms and devices, developers are starting to integrate many of the new features and frameworks into their web apps, websites and web designs.

The HTML5 specification contains a broad set of technologies at varying degrees of adoption and implementation. W3C encourages people to use the technologies (and actively calls for implementation during the Candidate Recommendation period) and provide feedback to the Working Groups in order to improve specification quality.

[...] randomly looking at posts for ideas on HTML 5 and graphing Great tutorial: http://www.elated.com/articles/snazzy-animated-pie-chart-html5-jquery/ from http://webdesigneraid.com/html5-canvas-graphing-solutions-every-web-developers-must-know/ [...]

[...] randomly looking at posts for ideas on HTML 5 and graphing Great tutorial: http://www.elated.com/articles/snazzy-animated-pie-chart-html5-jquery/ from http://webdesigneraid.com/html5-canvas-graphing-solutions-every-web-developers-must-know/ [...]

[...] chart, AwesomeJS and Google chart API. If you want to know more about the charting solution please click here. After the arrival HTML5 and CSS3, drawing a canvas in your website has become really easy, but the [...]